


Call Your Own Bluff

by starbolin



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-08
Updated: 2012-09-08
Packaged: 2017-11-13 19:14:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/506785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starbolin/pseuds/starbolin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What does it mean to know a person? Eames takes Arthur on holiday. They fuck, bicker, and surprise one another into a leap of faith.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Call Your Own Bluff

**Author's Note:**

> For enoughglitter, with apologies for its extreme tardiness.

Smile already in place as the door opened, Eames said, “How do you feel about island nations?”

Squinting, Arthur pushed his hair back from his face. There was a pillow crease across his cheek. He looked as if the million dollars Eames felt like had all been withdrawn from his account. “How did you find this hotel? I’m on a completely new ID.”

“Strategy and talent, as ever. Come to New Zealand. It’ll be lovely.”

A grimace pulled Arthur’s mouth sideways. “I was honestly going to take a break from working.”

Stepping inside without asking, Eames put a small kiss on Arthur’s jaw in passing. “Not work.”

“Oh.” Arthur closed the door behind them, shooting the bolt before crossing to the nightstand. He sat down at the edge of the rumpled bed and retrieved his watch from the nightstand, articulate fingers clumsy with sleep as he attempted to buckle it one-handed. “Okay, then I have to admit I’m pretty mystified.”

“It’s a lark.” Eames took pity and reached for Arthur’s wrist himself. “Say you’ll come.”

Arthur watched Eames put his watch band to rights, then pulled his hand free and picked up a piece of folded cardstock from the nightstand. “Do you want something from room service?”

Eames frowned down at him. “It’s hardly gone ten. Are you quite all right?” Arthur despised breakfast, was invariably nauseated by the idea of food until well into early afternoon and several cups of coffee.

“I was too tired for dinner. Do you want something or not?”

Eames tilted the menu by way of Arthur’s wrist. “No numbers, not a good sign.”

“Anything that means I don’t have to put clothes on.” Arthur’s smile was crooked, eye sockets dark with jet lag; he looked all-in, really, and Eames let go of the menu to slip a hand around the back of his neck.

“Come on holiday with me.”

Arthur shook his head. “What’s the sell?”

“A great deal of sex, mainly.” Eames leaned down to murmur in Arthur’s ear. “I could buy you some flightless birds. I’ve recently made a bit of money doing the impossible, you see.”

“Have you,” Arthur said, a laugh in his throat, and caught Eames’s mouth.

True to his word, Arthur remained in his clinging cotton pants and silky grey undershirt as he tipped for the trays. Perched sideways on a chair with one calf folded beneath him, shamelessly scooping thick cream from the bowl into his coffee, he asked, “Why are you trying to take me to New Zealand?”

Eames shrugged and pulled a plate of crepes toward himself. “I’ve never been.”

.

Faa’a International in the wee hours was a warm cloud of mist, sea-salty and sweet, smudging the lights of the terminal into catenary domes of soft, roiling white. Stepping off of the mobile stairs onto the wet tarmac with both of their carry-ons in hand, Eames nudged Arthur’s shoulder with his own. “We’ll be here past sunrise. Breakfast in Tahiti, if you’d like.”

“What’s the currency?”

Eames laced their fingers together, feeling reckless in the lotusland between ocean and shore. “Debit.”

“Eames.”

“Some sort of franc, if you’re determined to be twentieth-century about it, but I’m paying, so it doesn’t -- what?”

“You’re really not going to let me buy my own breakfast.” The set of Arthur’s mouth was quietly adding up expenses.

“I asked you to come,” Eames reminded him. “You’re doing me a favour -- no, that doesn’t sound good, let me try again.”

“Too late,” Arthur said. “I’m suspicious.” He sniffed at the air, stood on tiptoes and stretched his limbs as the line of passengers neared the open doors of the building, where tiny women handed flowers to each person as they passed inside. “You know what I realized on the plane? This won’t be my first visit. I was actually in New Zealand for about three days last year.”

“Really? What’s it like?”

“I have no idea,” Arthur said.

The sunrise was sharp and lemon-yellow when it came, and Eames reached across the cafe table to rub the backs of his knuckles gently over the stubble on Arthur’s jaw. Arthur looked at him curiously over the rim of his coffee cup, but didn’t push Eames’s hand away.

.

Eames dozed during the second leg and was vainly trying to put his clothes to rights as the plane dropped through the low, wet cloud cover over Waitemata Harbour. They leaned against one another during the shuttle journey into city centre, and carried a fog of jet lag with them into the hotel lobby.

Arthur, who had remained extremely awake throughout the entire flight, managed to unpack shoes and toiletries before wilting onto the coverlet with a faintly pitiful expression. Eames took the luggage from him and pulled the duvet over his legs, only shaking him awake when it began to approach last minute for room service supper. Afterward, they swapped shifts; Eames napped while Arthur sat curled in the armchair in his socks, face illuminated by the screen of his netbook, until at some point he was putting cool feet against Eames’s shins.

Eames woke for good just before dawn and spent twenty increasingly bored minutes listening to Arthur’s light snore before creeping away as quietly as he could manage, closing the door of the loo to muffle the sounds of toothbrush and shower. He read about museums and natural features and points of interest until the quiet became unbearable, then woke Arthur by pressing kisses up the vertebrae of his spine, starting at the coccyx. In a familiar progression, Arthur started off whimpering in protest, but by the time Eames moved into the thoracic region with generous, sucking bites, he was reaching beneath himself to adjust his cock, sighing and arching under Eames’s tongue.

Afterward, he wiped a stray plash of Eames’s come from his cheek and lay face-down in the sheets, hair damp and curling around his temples. Eames put a hand at the small of his back, tracing lines across sweaty skin; Arthur murmured appreciatively, unmoving.

Presently, Eames said, “We could do this all day and get room service again.”

“Saving us from having to go out and actually experience the city,” Arthur mumbled into the mattress. “What an ingenious idea.”

“Very well, then,” Eames said, smiling as he followed the line of Arthur’s spine with his fingers. “Just be sure to bin any mysterious telephone numbers beneath your plate. I won’t have my plans disrupted by some Swedish design student on holiday.”

“I don’t know why you think I get laid all the time,” Arthur said, freeing his face from the bedclothes. “I hardly get laid at all.”

“Really,” Eames said, not believing a word, and pressed a thumb into the muscle beside Arthur’s spine. “Who was the last, then? Besides me.”

“Mal.” Arthur’s tone was nothing out of the ordinary, so that it took Eames a minute to put two and two together.

His hand stopped. “Mal Cobb?”

Arthur was quiet for a moment, then said, “Yeah.”

“Hell,” Eames said. “You aren’t kidding about not getting any. What were you, twenty?”

Arthur was very still beneath his hand.

Eames said slowly, “Unless it was after she was married.”

Abruptly, Arthur got up and went into the bathroom, turned on the faucet. The water didn’t quite drown out the sound of the toilet lid closing.

Eames went to the open door and leaned against the frame, looking down at Arthur’s bowed back on the closed toilet, his bare legs. He was holding a facecloth in both hands, and Eames hated not being able to see his expression.

“Sorry if I touched a sore spot.”

“It’s fine.” Arthur stood without looking at Eames and leaned over the basin, passing the cloth beneath the faucet and pressing it to his eyes.

“You do realize that of all the people in the world, I may be the least qualified to judge.”

“It’s fine,” Arthur said again, shoulders relaxing a little.

.

Eames, who was far more accustomed to a full breakfast than sex first thing, only came fully awake looking at the morning sky above Queen Street, cut into a thousand blue-and-white rectangles by the sharp architectural grid of the transport centre’s back wall. Coffee in one hand, Gitanes in the other, he shifted impatiently as the escalator sank beneath street level, just managing to avoid spilling on himself as he stepped off at the bottom.

Busy amoebas of seasonal tourists were scattered across the floor, the echoes of their voices bouncing around the chrome vault of the terminus, but he soon spotted Arthur on a bench beneath a skylight, legs crossed, scrolling down on his touchphone with a line of concentration between his brows. He didn’t look up until Eames was right in front of him, and then he raked his loose curls back from his forehead and accepted the cup.

"Thought you were just going to find an ATM." He took the lid off and sniffed the coffee; Eames watched this fussy, pointless ritual with anthropological interest, feeling self-satisfied when the flat white appeared to pass muster.

“Did Cobb know?” Eames said without having realized he was going to say it.

“You tell me,” Arthur said after a moment, and his dark eyes, when he raised them briefly, were as unreadable as Eames had ever seen them.

He was quiet as they boarded, but slowly defrosted through the railway ride, becoming downright jaunty as he bought a third coffee and browsed Manukau’s selection of tourist tat like he actually enjoyed it, touching wool knits and carved wood, thumbing through big, glossy-paged coffee table books.

 _On This Day,_ Eames read over Arthur’s shoulder. _50 years of bizarre, funny, and fascinating events, 1960-2010._ He reached around Arthur’s body and flipped to June 1978.

“Ha,” Arthur said. “I knew you were younger than you dress.” He closed the book on Eames’s fingers and moved on, trailing one hand along a row of blown-glass kiwi birds as he disappeared around the shelf.

They took the train back to central Auckland for lunch down by the harbour. Arthur rolled up the sleeves of his shirt and was visibly knowing and amused when Eames selected their table based on field of view. It was as much out of pleasure as instinct; the passersby made a lovely background to Arthur’s tidy contentment, sauntering past the windows in scatters of laughter, hair ruffled by the sea breeze. Waiting for their orders, they talked in idle circles: survivalism, Manitoba, LSD, building environmental dreams. Arthur, linear thinker, had only ever done it by visiting or heavily researching a similar landscape in order to work from fractals of its basic features. 

The conversation landed, briefly, on Cobb: “My professor,” Arthur said.

“No,” Eames said, aghast, and Arthur laughed, busily loading his fork with the last of his seafood.

“I was his TA in my junior year. He totally took advantage of me, too. That’s how I met Mal, running errands for them.” The smile as he said her name was quick, gone almost before Eames saw it.

“You got on with her.”

Arthur chewed, swallowed. “We did, yeah. She grew up in France and never spent much time anywhere else, until she took a job transfer to California when her father got remarried. Met Cobb right away. She had fluent English, but her accent was still so thick most people had trouble understanding her.” He tapped his empty fork against his empty plate, set it down. “I have good French. I did then, too; I’d already been speaking it for awhile. I think it made her feel less isolated.”

Eames was well aware that Arthur’s French was far better than good. “He wasn’t ever worried, leaving a lovely Francophone alone with his gorgeous French wife?”

Arthur snorted. “I was twenty-two and looked nineteen. I’d be surprised if it even occurred to him to view it that way. It certainly never occurred to me.” He picked up a piece of bread and began to tear it apart. “And I think I was seeing Dallas when we met. He probably assumed I was gay.”

“How long between?”

Arthur blinked, then visibly made the slight jump. “About three years. I was twenty-six in Quezon City.” Where they’d slept together for the first time, last year -- a hot prickle bloomed across the skin at the small of Eames’s back at the memory. Arthur dazed and open-mouthed, pushing back against him, both of them panting and slick with sweat as hot summer rain pattered against the window, traffic shushing over the wet streets below.

“Twenty-three,” Eames deducted flatly. “And Cobb took you on the run with him.”

Arthur shook his head, dropped his handful of breadcrumbs. “Twenty-four, and he called me. I’d been out of the country for almost a year.”

“Studying abroad?” Eames lifted his wine glass, sniffed lightly at the remains of the Riesling.

“Being a fugitive.”

Eames put down the glass and stared, fascinated. “Do I know anything about you?”

Arthur’s cheeks dimpled.

They took the ferry to the volcano in the bay, because of course Arthur would want to walk all over the surface of a volcano. Eames followed him to the blunt bow of the boat, where Arthur draped his bare forearms over the railing, staring across the expanse of Parisian blue to Rangitoto’s dark, low-slung silhouette. The clamminess of the sea spray would have been unpleasant on a cooler day; as it was, Eames leaned into it, eyes slitted against the wind, as he turned over the fact that he was still stumbling over enormous chunks of unearthed mystery.

He’d worked -- and slept -- with plenty of people about whom he knew very little, who knew even less about him, but a one-off tended to follow different rules, involving very little of the informational osmosis of an ongoing working relationship. In retrospect, it was startling: in the two years that Eames had known him, in all of the conversations over blueprints or cocktails or hard-ons, Arthur had inquired remarkably seldom into Eames’s personal history; had volunteered nearly nothing of his own. For all Eames knew how Arthur fought, fucked, planned, slept, for all he was intimately familiar with the tidiness and angular grace of Arthur’s mind spread out around him, he had very little in the way of cold fact.

“You don’t have any close family, do you,” Eames said.

Arthur turned his head, looking startled, blinking as his hair blew against his face, into his eyes. “No.”

“I don’t either.”

“I figured.” Arthur watched Eames curiously for a while after that, but didn’t say anything further, and Eames was content to stand in silence. As they neared the island, the ferry sliced across another boat’s wake, lurching upward like the forerunner of successful flight.

The casino beneath the Sky Tower was a distinct let-down, but it turned out there was a revolving restaurant, which Arthur considered it his duty as an ugly American to sample, so Eames paid an English couple forty dollars for their dinner reservation and they rode the elevator up the tower’s long stem. Against the slowly unspooling backdrop of stars and city lights, he found himself studying Arthur’s face every couple of minutes, trying to overlay sun-pinked cheekbones and tousled hair with the memory of eye sockets bruised with sleeplessness, the way Arthur had gnawed at the insides of his own cheeks as he’d worked. 

“You had my attention right off,” he said. “Before you even looked up.”

An odd little smile flashed across Arthur’s face before he looked away. “I’m an attractive guy.”

.

On the second day, they rented a car on the ID Arthur was using and drove south. Eames rolled up the cuffs of his linen trousers and lolled blissfully in the passenger’s seat, window down, watching the coastline appear and disappear far below. Arthur looked equally relaxed to the casual glance, but Eames knew him too well: his knuckles tight on the wheel, a tiny line between his brows.

“Will you please unwind just a fraction,” Eames said, sliding a hand onto Arthur’s upper thigh. “I have every faith in your ability not to drive us over a cliff.”

“That hand doesn’t go any higher until we’re parked,” Arthur warned, but a moment later, he unwrapped his left fingers from the wheel just long enough to touch the back of Eames’s wrist, where the hairs glinted against a perpetual tan.

They pulled up beside a shabby little shop; Eames preferred to stretch his legs around the gravel car park rather than browse. He was sat on the hood of the car with his feet up on the bumper when Arthur came out wearing a bush hat of camel-coloured suede, a tiny bunch of feathers tucked into the band. It should have looked absolutely stupid, but instead it gave him a handsome insouciance, like a particularly stylish backpacker.

“You look like I’ve hired you to carry my luggage,” Eames said, and Arthur kept walking until he was squashed up between Eames’s thighs, dropped his plastic bag onto the hood so that he could hold onto the front of Eames’s shirt with both hands as he kissed Eames’s mouth. Then he made Eames get everything from the boot and carry it down the footpath to the shore while he strolled alongside unburdened, hands in his pockets.

Even at mid-morning, the charcoal sand was nearly too hot to walk over. Eames ended up bounding the last few yards while Arthur, safe and smug in flip-flops, snickered behind him.

In deeper water, Arthur clung to Eames’s back and murmured, “I don’t think I realized how bad your tattoos are,” which was a shocking lie for which Eames forced him to tread his own sodding water, until Arthur took to ducking under and snaking his hands into Eames’s swimmers, obliging Eames to drag him onshore before they both drowned.

“Did you want to straight away?” Eames said. “With me, I mean.”

Arthur gave a dubious _mm_ and turned over on the blanket. “I wasn’t paying attention to that kind of thing when we met.”

“Really,” Eames said, shading his eyes with one hand to watch a seabird take off from the rocks. “How did we end up in bed, then?”

“Obviously I started paying attention.” Arthur stretched, then shifted closer, nose brushing Eames’s biceps muscle. “I remember noticing you when we went under together the first time.”

“Ah.” As soon as he’d opened his eyes in Makati CBD, Eames had strolled up to Arthur as Cobb and engaged him in conversation about the traffic patterns around Tower One until the real Cobb had appeared around the corner of Ayala Avenue, startling Arthur into pulling a gun. “The demonstration of my unparalleled talents. Understandable.”

“Actually, it was watching your mouth turn back into this up close.” Arthur’s thumb touched the center of Eames’s lower lip briefly.

“That is unbelievably base,” Eames reproached, pleased.

Later, sunburned and footsore in the hotel elevator, he finally left off sucking on Arthur’s salty collarbone in order to get Arthur’s knee in the crook of his forearm, lifting him and pressing him against the wall, driving their groins together in a painful grind. He felt crazed, delirious with savagery, as if he could rub himself bloody against Arthur’s body, turn himself inside out coming, and still be hungry.

“Fffuck,” Arthur breathed into Eames’s shoulder, thighs like iron around Eames’s hips, yanking at the front of Eames’s shirt as if he could possibly do anything to bring Eames closer. “Oh fuck, please make me come. I want it, I want you--”

Eames groaned from deep in his chest, hitched Arthur higher up and got his arms around Arthur’s thighs. They were through the elevator door and halfway down the hall before Arthur writhed violently enough to break Eames’s carry; the moment his feet touched the ground, Arthur was pushing his hands into Eames’s clothing again, repeatedly tripping the both of them the rest of the way to the door, then biting at Eames’s throat as Eames crammed his key card into the slot the wrong way round twice, swearing.

Arthur sounded as if he were crying as he neared orgasm, yanking at the bedclothes in his effort to meet Eames, and was then completely silent while he came, tendons standing out at throat and wrist. Eames spent himself only a few minutes later, coaxed along by Arthur’s loose-limbed caresses; even as the clench of pleasure eased, sleep rushed up on him, like falling down a well. 

Shortly, he surfaced to the sight of Arthur draped over his groin, rubbing parted lips over the thickening shaft of his cock in a sliver of golden late-afternoon light. Clutching at the spume of jumbled dreams, Eames mumbled, “You’re the Bolton bloody Strid, that’s what you are. I've got no idea how deep you go. It makes me insane that I wouldn’t even know what questions to ask.”

Arthur slipped his hand beneath Eames’s cock, lifted it from Eames’s belly to press it against his own cheek, eyes closed. “You can ask whatever’s on your mind.”

Eames was still too close to the first round to get beyond mostly-erect, but he let Arthur toy with him for awhile longer before taking matters into his own hands. He liked feeling Arthur get hard in his mouth, was sorry to have missed it, but this was good too, the taut skin over Arthur’s glans and the salt at the tip proof of how much Arthur enjoyed touching him. Arthur’s orgasm gratified him enormously when it came. He felt heavy with sun-warmed indolence as Arthur kissed him afterward, as Arthur’s weight left the bed. 

Hearing the shower starting, he rolled onto his side and angled himself to watch through the open door as Arthur scooped water from the basin faucet into his mouth and then stepped in, long muscles of his legs flexing. 

Most of the clothing they’d worn was a miniature topographical diorama between the door and the bed, but Eames’s trousers were crushed into the bedclothes beneath him. Sorely in need of a piss, he drew them up his legs and forced himself upright and into the loo. He was still post-coital enough that the stream commenced with an odd, twisting wrench in his groin. 

One of Arthur’s silky grey undershirts was crumpled on the vanity, trailing carelessly into the dry basin, clearly left over from the morning. Eames moved it aside to splash water on his face. 

He shook his head vigorously afterward, droplets of water pattering onto the tiles; then, without thinking too much about it, he picked up the undershirt again, turned it right-side-out, and pulled it over his head. It stretched over his biceps and clung to the contours of his chest and abdomen, hem brushing the cut of his hipbones just above the slipping waistband of his unbuttoned trousers. He remembered it being longer on Arthur, but there was proportion for you.

The water shut off just as he turned sideways, and he glanced up as the curtain was drawn back, expecting to be crabbed at for the dark blots of water where he’d picked the shirt up with wet hands, and likely for the obvious textile stress as well. 

Instead, Arthur was silent, eyes startled and avid on Eames’s chest. Finally, he lifted his gaze to Eames’s face and said wryly, “It never looked like that on me.” He pushed his wet hair back from his face with both hands and reached for a towel, and Eames, released from his attention, breathed again, groin feeling slightly congested as the residuum of recent orgasm was flooded with the fresh erotic charge of Arthur’s covetousness.

He wore the shirt out of the hotel, into the violet of evening. As they crossed the intersection toward the harbour, Arthur wound their forearms together between their bodies and leaned in close, inhaling deeply at Eames’s shoulder. 

“Are you smelling yourself on me,” Eames said.

“Yes,” Arthur said, rough, and Eames had to breathe out carefully, look toward the steady aerial curve of the harbour bridge, lit up against the Pthalo bloom of encroaching dusk.

The restaurant where they’d had lunch the day before was transformed by the evening, candles on the tables to match the lights on the water through the huge windows. Eames had an Australian shiraz that tasted the way Arthur’s skin felt under his tongue, the velvety insides of his elbows and the plump curve of his arse. Afterward, they walked along the pier until Arthur abruptly pushed them against the railing, putting his nose shamelessly into Eames’s underarm, the hollow behind his ear.

There was a cruise ship docked, four stories of white hull studded with portholes. Eames imagined Arthur on a pool chair in the middle of the Caribbean; then he imagined the two of them on a houseboat, limbs wound together in the closeness of the captain’s berth as waves rocked them. He put his hands in Arthur’s hair, scratching gently until Arthur’s eyes slipped closed, then tipped Arthur’s head backward to kiss his neck. “How long until you start taking jobs again?”

Arthur went tense in Eames’s arms. “Is that a serious question?”

“I’m genuinely asking, if that’s what you mean.”

“I don’t -- I’m confused. What is this, then?”

“What’s what?”

“This! This whole thing you’re doing, where you fly me out here and don’t let me buy my own dinner and f-fuck me like you’re trying to leave an impression. I thought you were -- that we were saying goodbye, because you figured it out.”

With brittle composure, Eames said, “Figured what out, exactly.”

“I’m not taking any more jobs.” As Eames let go of his hair, Arthur straightened, opening his eyes to regard Eames on the level. “I don’t want to do it anymore. I’m getting out.”

When Eames could speak through his distress, he said, “Are you.”

“Yeah. I wasn’t sure, but yeah.”

“What will you do?”

“I don’t know.” Arthur gave a short, hiccuping laugh. “I have no idea, actually.”

“Come stay with me, then.”

Arthur's eyebrows shot up. “Stay with you?”

“Live with me,” Eames corrected. Arthur was silent. Eames cleared his throat, dropped his hands to the small of Arthur’s back. “If you’d like to.”

“Really,” Arthur said.

Eames grimaced, looking away.

“I’m not saying no,” Arthur added. “I’m just startled.”

“Cards on the table,” Eames said after a long moment, eyes fixed on the dark water just past Arthur’s shoulder. “For whatever it's worth, I probably love you. I’ve got a flat in Nairobi and I’d like to have you there while you decide what to do. If you don’t stay after that... well, I’d like knowing where you go.”

“Oh,” Arthur said.

“Oh?” Eames repeated.

“Okay,” Arthur clarified, and when Eames looked, his eyes were bright.

They walked as far as they felt like going around the harbour, then back to the hotel, where Arthur curled into an armchair with his socks still on and made a handful of phone calls that Eames idly eavesdropped on as he readied himself for bed. It was midnight by the time Arthur joined him, planting an elbow in Eames’s side as he crawled under the covers. Eames had intended only to sleep, but Arthur’s sloppy apology kiss turned into a slow, hot slide of tongues, and then they were kicking free of the covers, Eames rolling Arthur over beneath him.

“So you will, then,” he demanded, in between kissing Arthur’s cheekbone and pulling at Arthur’s ear with his teeth.

“Yeah,” Arthur laughed, squeezing Eames’s bunched biceps, sliding his hands up to Eames’s shoulders. “You want it in writing? Yes, I’ll come home with you. I’ll wear your shirts around all day without asking and jerk off on your bed with my face in your pillow.”

“Hell, Arthur,” Eames said, and his hands were too unsteady to roll the condom down. Arthur took over the task, murmuring nonsense syllables around the curve of Eames’s lower lip, then pushed Eames down onto his back.

Arthur was uncharacteristically quiet, the tension in his body and the rush of his breath the only indications of his pleasure. They moved together, Arthur riding the arch and coil of Eames’s body, hands moving restlessly over Eames’s skin.

“Cobb gave me his PASIV,” Arthur said afterward, long limbs starfished out from Eames’s torso onto the wrecked sheets.

Eames’s eyes opened, fingertips halting in their gentle massage over Arthur’s scalp. “You’re kidding.”

“He didn’t even say anything. He just handed it to me, and by the time I stopped staring at it like an idiot he was already walking away.”

“You didn’t bring it. I’d have noticed.”

“It’s stashed. I’m supposed to pick it up within the month, or it gets hand-delivered to Cobb with a note. I wasn’t sure what I’d end up doing.” As Eames shifted Arthur’s weight further onto the right side of his chest to relieve his ribs, Arthur turned his head, tucked his face into Eames’s throat. “It’s mil-spec, from the Endymion project. A 2f, but I fixed the outflow issue awhile back with a Gebhardt regulator.”

“Christ. Must be worth a fortune.”

“Probably, yeah. Last year I could have gotten three or four hundred thousand for it, but now we’ve got those custom jobs coming out of the Philippines.”

“USD?”

Arthur dug his nose into Eames’s skin and breathed in. “Euros.”

“Christ,” Eames said again. “Well, even a decent percentage of that would set you up nicely. Do you have a line on a buyer yet?”

Arthur inhaled Eames’s scent again, then turned his head slightly. His eyelashes tickled Eames’s jawbone. “You want it?”

Eames grinned, a spark of excitement arrowing through his overstimulated nerves. “I’d need a couple of days to get cash in order, but that was what I was suggesting, yes.”

“Not what I meant.”

“What?”

“I mean, just. Do you want it.”

When Eames was quiet, Arthur got his elbows beneath him and pushed up, frowning down at Eames’s face. After a moment, he said, “Okay then,” and resettled himself against Eames’s body, ribcage expanding and contracting steadily beneath the hands Eames cupped over his shoulder blades. Just as Eames believed him asleep, he murmured, “You know a lot about me already. Probably more than you think.”

Whatever’s on your mind, Arthur had said, and Eames closed his eyes. “Have you ever been in love?”

Arthur was quiet for a long time, then said, “Maybe,” and touched Eames’s collarbone with his fingertips; left them there as he fell asleep.


End file.
